Recently Empire Parking Lot Services was contracted to layout and paint 12 stalls at a local Los Angeles mall for Tesla Motors. Normally a small parking lot striping project wouldn’t even be a project that we carry on about, however this one ended up being a bit of a challenge and we don’t mind taking on a challenges for a cool company like Tesla.
Specifically the project was a new "Supercharger Station" installation at the Fox Hills Mall in El Segundo California. (also known as Westfield Culver City at 6000 Sepulveda Blvd in Culver City). This project required us to prep and paint 6 charging stalls at 2 locations pretty close to one another. We also created a custom parking stencil for each stall and sealed these areas for a more durable outdoor finish.
This project was a bit of an experiment on painting asphalt surfaces. Traditionally asphalt is not painted a solid color because it's too soft to support paint for long periods of time. Even parking lines on roads and freeways are not typically driven on as much as painted areas in a parking lot or structure. When Tesla came to us with this concept we agreed to give it a try.
Although we have no way of knowing how long the paint will hold up, we had some ideas of which particular products to use. These were newer products that we have had great luck with in the past. The first product we applied was the red background paint. This product is a very high end acrylic traffic paint made specifically with parking structures and parking lots in mind. Due to the large amount of paint in the area where we knew a ton of pedestrian traffic would be, we applied a non slip additive in between the first and second coat of the red paint application, which added texture to the surface to reduce any chances of slipping on the painted surface when it gets wet. With the red paint completed and the anti-slip installed, we then moved on to adding that iconic Tesla logo; we had a custom stencil created out of light aluminum for this and our future Tesla Motor projects. Lastly, we painted the actual line striping for the parking stalls using a white waterborne acrylic. Empire Parking Lot Services has been working with Tesla Motors now for over 4 years! They are truly an amazing company with wonderful people and we appreciate all the opportunities that they have given us.
